Day 547 Freedom: A Weekend.

 

Couture gets Christmassy

Dan got sick of the bare tree and added baubles.

SNOW!

Path from the subway to work is white again.

Siblings reunited.

Brother and sister excited to see each other.

Dan showed Donna our favourite snowball fight snow.

Skating at midnight.

Toronto City Hall

Hudson’s Bay have Christmas window displays.

Walk In clinic consult rooms sit the doctor at a raised desk that is like a mini one-person court room.

Sister-in-law arrived last night.  Dan has been looking forward to being reunited with his sister for months.  They’ve spent most of today traipsing about Toronto.  Last night we went to the Scotiabank cinema at finally saw the new Hunger Games instalment.  It dragged on a bit for me, but it was a Friday night and I’d just worked every day for the past 12 days, each day only 9 – 11 hour. No day had been ridiculously busy but cumulatively my stamina waned and it got exponentially more difficult to smile.  Wake,  eat, work, eat, sleep, repeat.  Each day was like being stabbed in the spleen and slowly bleeding all day; I was anaemic by Friday.

Today I was thankful to sleep in, a new record: 09:45.  Donna was still asleep so I crept up, and was going to jump on her but then Dan remembered that we tried jumping onto the IKEA wooden slat day bed before, and had broken two slats.  I didn’t even get time to jump; Donna rolled over, saw me tiptoe towards her and screamed in fright.  It’s so nice to have a sister in town.  I spent all last night trying to convince her that the symmetric power plugs had a left and a right side and other slightly ridiculous things.  Even though it’s been two years since I’ve seen Donna she apparently remembers me fooling her before and had wised up.

While Dan took Donna ice skating and to an ice hockey game I went and got my hair cut, tidied the apartment, and experienced a “Walk-In” clinic, to get a prescription for a new salbutamol MDI and for therapeutic massage (our health insurance offers a rebate, provided it’s been doctor-referred).  The Walk-In was an experience; a young woman in a tracksuit stormed back and forth from the waiting room chairs to the unfriendly to everybody receptionist loudly declaring that she needed to see a doctor as an emergency (I would have gone to an actual Emergency Department myself) despite not having thought to bring any identification with her.  The waiting room filled up and everybody sighed quietly in relief when she stormed out, banging the glass door as it flew open and hit the doorframe.

We’re taking Donna to Fly2 tonight.  Hopefully I can stay awake past 10 pm.